The Reserve Ladders

by G. A. Henty, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

A Tale of the Naval Brigade before Sebastopol, 1855

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Boys who write to me ask now and then why so few of my heroes are sailors, and why the ones I have do so much running about. Here is a sailor, then, and one who ran very little. He was a boy whose great day consisted chiefly in lying still in a trench with a bag of wool under his chest, and in doing what he was told. I think it was the hardest day's work he ever did, and I think it did more for him than any charge would have done.

I was in the Crimea myself that summer, not as a soldier but as a very young man in the Purveyor's Department, whose business was the bedding, the clothing and the stores of the hospitals. It was not glorious work. A purveyor counts blankets. But a man who counts blankets in a war sees the war from an angle the generals do not, for every man who is hit comes to him in the end, and he must be found a bed and a shirt. That is how I came to know Harry Pellow.

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Harry was the son of a Mousehole fisherman, and he went to sea at thirteen as a boy second class, because the pilchards had failed two years running and there were five younger than himself at home. By the spring of 1855 he was fifteen, a boy first class, and he had been ashore with the Naval Brigade since the autumn before.

I dare say some of you do not know what the Naval Brigade was, and you should, for it is one of the finest things in the history of that war. When the army sat down before Sebastopol in the autumn of 1854, it was found that the siege guns it had brought were not enough for the work, and the fleet was asked to land guns and men to serve them. The sailors dragged their heavy ship's guns up from Balaklava and from the bays to the north, over hills that would have broken the heart of a team of horses, and they mounted them in batteries in the right attack, facing the great earthwork which the Russians called the Third Bastion and we called the Redan. There they stayed all through that dreadful winter, firing, repairing, firing again, and they were the cheeriest men in the camp. The soldiers used to say you could tell the sailors' batteries a mile off by the noise of them, for the bluejackets sang at the guns.

Harry's ship I will not name, for there are men alive who served in her and would not thank me for it. She was a frigate, and she sent ashore a lieutenant, two midshipmen and some sixty men, and among them the boy, whose duty at first was to carry powder from the magazine to the guns. It is a duty which requires a cool head more than a strong back. A boy who runs with powder under fire learns very soon that the man who hurries is the man who trips.

The officer whose name was in every sailor's mouth was Captain William Peel, the son of the great Sir Robert. You may read of him in the histories, but the histories do not tell you what the men said of him, and I heard a good deal of that. In October, at the first bombardment, a Russian shell had come into the battery where he was, with its fuse burning, and fallen among the powder cases. Peel had picked it up and thrown it over the parapet, and it burst as it left his hands. He had done it, the men said, "as cool as if it were a cricket-ball." They did not say it as you or I would say it, with wonder. They said it as men state a fact about a ship's officer that tells you what he is: he trims his sails close, he knows his gun drill, and he throws shells out of batteries.

Harry saw him for the first time in the winter. The boy was sitting on a shot-box behind the gun, mending the toe of his boot with a sail-needle and a piece of spun-yarn, for no boots were to be had that month for love or money, and a tall officer stopped and watched him.

"Who taught you that stitch?" said the officer.

"My father, sir. It's a net stitch."

"Does it hold?"

"It holds a net, sir," said Harry, and then, because he was afraid that sounded impudent, "It'll hold a boot till Saturday."

The officer laughed and went on, and the gunner's mate came and told Harry with some heat who it was he had been talking to. Harry said afterwards that if he had known it was Captain Peel he would have stood up, and that if he had stood up he would have dropped the boot, and that on the whole he was glad he had not known.

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The winter passed, and spring, and by June everyone in the camp knew that an assault was coming. The French had taken the Mamelon, the hill in front of the Malakoff, on the 7th; the guns had been pounding the Russian works for days; and on the evening of the 17th of June the word went round that the attack would be made at daybreak, on the anniversary of Waterloo. The French were to storm the Malakoff, and the English the Redan.

Now the Redan stood some way in front of our advanced trenches, with open ground between, which the Russians had swept for nine months with every gun they had and knew to a yard. The troops could not climb its face without ladders, and they could not cross its ditch without something to fill it, and so it was arranged that the Naval Brigade should furnish ladder parties. There were to be four of them, each of sixty men, carrying the scaling-ladders and the wool-bags before the storming columns. Captain Peel asked to lead one, and did.

You will understand that there was no lack of volunteers. The men of Harry's ship crowded round their lieutenant that evening like boys round a sweet-stall, and Harry crowded with them, and the lieutenant picked his men, and Harry was not among them.

He went to the lieutenant afterwards and asked why. It was a liberty, and a boy first class who takes it is very likely to be sent about his business, but the lieutenant was a good-natured young man and he had a boy brother of his own at home.

"Because you are fifteen and you weigh about seven stone," he said, "and a scaling-ladder weighs a good deal more than that and has to be run with. But you shall go, Pellow, since you are so set on it. You will go in the reserve parties with the wool-bags. Two parties are to be kept back in the trench, ready to go forward if the first two are knocked over. You will lie where you are put until you are ordered out. Do you understand me? Until you are ordered."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"I want to hear you say it."

"Until I'm ordered, sir."

Harry's messmate, Sam Jago, an Ordinary Seaman of St Ives, was picked for the first parties. He was nineteen, very broad, and very proud of it, and he was to be one of the men on the second ladder. He spent the evening greasing his boots with pork fat and telling Harry that the reserves would see nothing but the backs of the men in front, and that he would wave his hat from the top of the Redan so that Harry might know where to bring the wool.

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They went down into the trenches in the dark, some hours before dawn. I have heard Harry describe it so often that I almost feel I was there: the long zigzag of the approaches, the sandbags wet with dew, the smell of powder and of the camp, which was not a pleasant smell in June, and the sound of a great many men trying to be quiet, which is a louder sound than you would suppose. The ladder parties went forward to the advanced trench, and the reserves lay down behind them, each man with his wool-bag, which was a coarse sack crammed hard and weighing perhaps half a hundredweight.

Harry lay with his bag under his chest and his chin on the top of it. The trench wall was in front of his face. He could not see over it, and he had been told not to try. Behind him a sergeant of the line was eating a biscuit very slowly, as though he meant to make it last until the war was over.

The signal for the English was to be given when the French were established in the Malakoff. What happened instead you may read in the books, and I will tell it shortly. The French on our right went forward early, nearly an hour before the time, before all their columns were in place, and the Russians, who had guessed what was coming, were ready for them. There was a sudden roar of musketry to the right, and then of guns, and the whole line of the Russian works lit up from end to end. Lord Raglan, seeing the French committed and in trouble, would not leave them to bear it alone, and he gave the signal for the English to go before the moment was right.

Harry heard the order shouted along the trench in front of him, and heard the ladder parties go. It is a sound he never forgot: not a cheer, he said, for they did not cheer at first, but the scrape and knock of the ladders against the trench wall as they were heaved up over it, and the grunt of the men lifting them, and then a noise like a sudden squall of hail on a slate roof, which was the grape.

He did not see what happened then, for he was lying with his chin on a wool-bag looking at the wall of a trench. That was his whole view of the assault on the Redan: a wall of earth and gabions, a little grass growing out of a sandbag, and the sky above it turning from grey to white. I want you to think about that. A boy who has been told all winter that the Redan is to be stormed, who has carried powder for nine months to the guns that are to make the breach for it, lies at last a few hundred yards from the place, and all he sees is the wall of the trench and a tuft of grass.

The noise in front grew worse. Men began to come back over the parapet, some walking, some carried, a few crawling. A soldier fell into the trench almost on top of Harry with his face grey and his hand pressed to his side, and said quite politely, "Beg pardon, mate," and lay there. A ladder came back, carried by two men where four had carried it out. Then a sailor of another ship came over the top and dropped down beside the reserves and said, "They've knocked the first lot to pieces. Captain's down. Hit bad." Harry asked him about the second ladder of his own ship, and the man said he did not know, and that nobody knew anything, and that the ground in front was like a ploughed field with the grape that was coming across it.

Now here is the point of my story.

Every boy in that reserve party wanted to go over the parapet. It was not that they were heroes, though some of them were. It was that lying still while your friends are being killed a few hundred yards away is very nearly unbearable. Doing something, anything, is a relief; and the thing that lay to hand was to get up and run forward with the wool-bag. Two or three men of the reserves did get up, and an officer pulled them down again by their belts and swore at them in a manner which I will not repeat.

Harry got as far as his knees. He said afterwards that he did not decide to get up. He found that he was up. And then he heard, quite clearly in his head, his own voice saying "Until I'm ordered, sir," and he lay down again, and put his chin on the bag, and stayed there.

I have known men who won the Victoria Cross, and I have asked some of them what was the bravest thing they ever did, and not one of them named the deed the Cross was given for. They named some moment when they had kept still. I believe Harry Pellow did the bravest thing of his life when he lay down again in that trench.

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The order did not come. The reserves were never sent forward. When the generals saw what had happened, that the columns had been destroyed almost within a few dozen yards of their own trench, and that to send more men across that ground was only to fill it with more dead, the assault was stopped. The sun came up on the 18th of June, the day of Waterloo, on a field in front of the Redan strewn with red coats and blue jackets and broken ladders.

The ladder parties that went forward lost, as I recall the return, ten killed and more than forty wounded. Captain Peel had carried the first ladder until he was struck down; his young aide-de-camp, a midshipman of eighteen, brought him off. The men did not speak of the wound so much as of the fact that the captain had been seen, on the way back, trying to pick up a ladder that somebody had dropped.

Sam Jago did not come back with the others.

The reserves were withdrawn up the trench a little way, and told to wait, and Harry went to his lieutenant, whose head was bound up in a handkerchief, and asked if he might go and look for his messmate.

"No," said the lieutenant.

"Sir, he's out in front. He might be lying out there."

"I know where he is, Pellow. So do the Russians. Nobody goes over that parapet in daylight. You'll go when it's dark, and I shall go with you, and so will two others. Until then you'll sit here, and you'll eat something."

It was the second time that day that Harry had been told to wait, and I think it was harder than the first, for the first time there had been a reason he could see. He sat in the trench all that long hot day. The Russian sharpshooters fired at anything that showed above the parapet, and once a man in the next traverse put up his cap on a ramrod to draw their fire, and it came down with two holes in it. The flies were very bad. Harry did not eat, whatever the lieutenant had said. Toward afternoon he heard a man calling out, somewhere in front, faintly, for water; and he could not tell if it was Jago's voice or not, and he never knew.

When it was dark the lieutenant took him and two seamen out over the parapet, and they crawled across the ground in front, among the dead. I will not describe it to you. Harry never described it to me, except to say that the grass was wet, and that the wool-bags were the worst, for they were scattered everywhere and in the dark each of them looked like a man lying down.

They found Jago about sixty yards out, in a shallow scrape in the ground behind a dead soldier of the line, where he had dragged himself. A grape-shot had broken his thigh. He had lain there all day under the sun, and he had drunk the water of the man beside him, which he said very earnestly the dead man would not have grudged him. When Harry put his hand on his shoulder he said, "Took your time, young 'un," and then, which Harry said was the only time he had known him fail of a joke, "Don't leave me out here."

They did not leave him. They brought him in on a ladder, which is what ladders were good for that night. It was slow work, for a broken thigh cannot be hurried, and twice a Russian picket fired at the sound of them, and twice they lay flat with Jago between them, biting on the strap of his own cap so as not to cry out. Harry had his end of the ladder the whole way. He weighed about seven stone, as the lieutenant had said. I do not know how he did it, and nor did he.

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That is how I came into it. A few days later, Jago came down to the hospital at Balaklava in a mule-litter, with Harry walking beside him, for the boy had got leave to take him down and nobody in the brigade had the heart to refuse. I was at a table in a shed by the harbour with a list of blankets in front of me, and there were more men coming in than there were beds, and Harry stood in front of my table and asked me, quite civilly but as though nothing in the world would move him, where his messmate was to sleep.

I told him I would find a bed when I could.

"He lay out on the ground all Monday, sir," Harry said. "Begging your pardon, I'll wait till you can."

He waited. He sat on the end of the litter-pole outside my shed all that afternoon, and every time I looked up he was there, and every time a bed came free I found that I had somehow put Jago's name against it before I knew I had done so. I dare say a good many purveyors' clerks have been managed in this way by people with a better claim than a boy first class, but never more thoroughly. When Jago was in his bed, which was a good one by the standards of that summer, with a straw mattress and two blankets and a shirt that was nearly new, Harry came and thanked me, and I asked him to sit down and tell me what had happened. He told me as I have told you, except that he left out the part about lying down again in the trench. I had that from his lieutenant, a long time afterwards.

Jago kept his leg, which was more than many did that year. He walked with a stick for the rest of his life, and he went home to St Ives and kept a little shop on the harbour that sold tobacco and fish-hooks, and I have bought both from him.

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Harry Pellow stayed with the Naval Brigade until the end. He was in the batteries in September when the second assault was made on the Redan, and failed again, and when the French took the Malakoff, and the Russians blew up their works and marched out of the south side of Sebastopol across the bridge of boats in the night. He saw the Redan, at last, from the inside. He told me it was a great deal smaller than he had supposed.

He came home a petty officer before he was eighteen, which is not usual, and he served his time and rose to be a chief boatswain's mate, and men who served under him have told me that he was the one petty officer in the ship who was never known to hurry and never known to be late. When the young seamen were fretting for something to happen, he used to tell them to sit down and mend their boots.

The last time I saw him was at Devonport, a good many years afterwards. A squad of boys from the training ship was being exercised at the scaling of a wall, with ladders, under his eye. One of them, a small boy, had got the foot of the ladder and was jumping with eagerness to be first up it, and Harry put a hand on his shoulder and held him there, without a word, until the boy above him had cleared the top. Then he took the hand away, and the boy went up like a squirrel.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Georgiō Alfrēdō Hentiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

G. A. Henty, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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